Most of the original authors posited that the constitution should be more of a living framework for future documents. Jefferson went so far as recommending that it be entirely rewritten every 19 years to better suit an incoming generation. It boggles my mind that so much energy and weight is given to a document. An entire branch of the federal government is allotted the task of interpreting the damn thing. Half of The original authors owned people…fucking owned people! Yet we hold them up as some noble group of well intentioned intellectuals carving in stone the rules a society they could have never imagined must live by. Fucking nuts.
In a letter written to James Madison from Paris just after the French Revolution had broken out,
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) argues that any Constitution expires after 19 years and must be renewed if it is not to become “an act of force and not of right”:
The year the U.S. Constitution was ratified was also the year the French Revolution broke out and Thomas Jefferson was there to witness it. In this letter to
James Madison, Jefferson asks whether or not “one generation of men has a right to bind another,” either in the form of a financial debt or a political obligation to obey a constitution of laws not contracted by that individual. He comes to the surprising conclusion that any constitution (the American included) has to lapse roughly after every generation (actually, based on his calculations, every 19 years) since it was first signed and ratified. Thus, the American Constitution should lapse and become null and void in 1808. Jefferson believed in the principle that “the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead” which meant that previous generations could not bind the current generation to pay their debts, or require them to work in their father’s occupation, or to accept the laws and constitution drawn up by their ancestors. In his mind, “no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law”. The only “umpire” between the generations was the law of nature.”